Edmondo De Amicis · 1886 · road

The May story from Edmondo De Amicis's Cuore, read aloud in Italian classrooms for a century. Marco is thirteen and lives in Genoa, and his mother went to Argentina to work as a servant and stopped writing. His father cannot go, so the boy who is too young to have a job is put on a ship instead - and crosses an ocean and a continent to find her.

1. 1
   Genoa

   A Ligurian family with nothing: the mother went to Buenos Aires years ago to work as a servant and send money home, the letters have stopped, and the youngest boy is the only one who can be spared - so he goes, at thirteen.

2. 2
   Buenos Aires

   Twenty-seven days at sea, and then the address he was given is wrong. The cousin who was to meet him is dead and the family his mother worked for has moved inland - and a boy with no Spanish is on his own in a strange city.

3. 3
   Rosario

   Up the Parana by boat, working his passage - and Italian emigrants he meets on the way put together the money for a train ticket north, because he is one of theirs and they know exactly what he is doing.

4. 4
   Cordoba

   He finds the engineer Mequinez at last, and the news is that his mother is not here: she went on with the family to Tucuman, five hundred miles further north, and that was months ago.

5. 5
   Tucuman

   On foot and by cart across the plains toward the sugar country, sleeping in ditches and carried part of the way by a wagon driver - a boy walking the length of a country because there is nobody else to send.

6. 6
   The Andes

   He reaches the house on the day his mother is refusing the operation that would save her, having decided she would rather die than go on - and she sees him in the doorway, and consents, and lives.